7 Effective Strategies For Personal Trainer Lead Generation

Developing personal trainer lead generation strategies is something you’ll need to do throughout your career, in order to ensure you maintain a consistent stream of clients. 

This article will breakdown 7 effective personal training lead generation strategies that you can implement both virtually and in-person. 

Enrolling on a Level 4 personal trainer course can help attract clients from specialist demographics that would otherwise go untapped. You’ll develop a highly sought-after specialism, and learn a huge range of applicable skills.

You can download OriGym’s FREE course prospectus to learn more about the qualifications we offer! 

7 Different Approaches To Personal Training Lead Generation

If you’re a newly qualified personal trainer or have recently launched your own business you may not be aware of what the term ‘lead generation’ means. 

Lead generation refers to a process of attracting potential clients to your business, by increasing their interest in the service you provide. This can be achieved through a variety of techniques, all of which will have the same end goal of getting more paying customers. 

The ‘lead’ refers to the individual who has expressed interest in your business. In doing so, they will provide you with personal information such as their name and contact details, which you can then use at a later stage to sell them your services.

By implementing any of the personal trainer lead generation strategies you can guarantee a constant stream of prospective clients. 

Of course, leads are just the first step. For a detailed explanation of how to sell after you’ve secured a lead, check out our guide on how to sell as a PT.

#1 - Build A Landing Page With Clear Calls To Action To Boost PT Leads

A ‘landing page’ is a specific webpage that is designed to achieve one targeted goal. This is achieved through directly guiding users (in this case your potential clients) to complete a specific action.

This is achieved by including a call to action (CTA) on your landing page, which encourages users to fulfil this specific goal through a direct command/prompt. Examples of CTAs include:

• Enquire Now
• Sign Up Here
• Book a FREE Consultation Today

Probably the most effective CTA to use to generate leads is one that asks users to book a consultation. 

By asking users to provide their name and contact details to book their free consultation, you can successfully generate a lead. Then, you can use the consultation as the perfect opportunity to sell to them and turn that lead into a paying client.

For example, at OriGym, our course pages act as landing pages, with multiple CTAs being placed throughout in order to prompt visitors to make an enquiry. Take our Nutrition courses online page as an example.

Here we can see that there are multiple CTAs which encourage prospective customers to ‘Make an Enquiry’ or ‘Download Prospectus’.

The orange box is called a capture box and the information it requires customers to fill in is what generates a lead. 

From this one CTA, we gain a customer's name and multiple forms of contact details, which allows our enrollment team to contact them at a later date to discuss the course in finer detail - in a similar fashion to a consultation.

If you wish to use this personal training lead generation strategy yourself, here is our definitive breakdown for creating a personal training landing page.

Step One: You Must Have an End Goal In Mind To Generate PT Leads 

Every successful landing page will have a specific goal in mind to generate personal trainer leads. 

For example, as we stated within the previous section you could use CTAs that prompt prospective clients to book a free consultation.

The prospect of getting something for free will increase the likelihood of a lead being generated. This is because prospective clients won’t have to commit to a purchase, and may therefore be more likely to part with their information.

In this instance, you will need to gain information such as a client’s:

• Name 
• Contact details
• The reason they want to sign up for training

An example of a company who does this well is MB PT:

Implementing a lead generation strategy like this will work to your advantage, as it will provide you with as much information on the prospective client as possible, increasing the chances of making a sale down the line.

Step Two: Choose a Landing Page Design That Will Help to Capture Personal Trainer Leads

A well-designed landing page will help to generate more leads, as clients will know exactly what is being asked of them. From this point, they should be able to directly see the CTAs, making the lead-generation process simple.

If you have yet to design a landing page of your own the following tools can be used:

• Wix
• SquareSpace
• Moosend 

Moosend is particularly useful for this task, as you can specifically filter through designs

For further design guidance, check out our article on creating a personal training landing page. Here you will find a detailed explanation into how you can ensure the aesthetics reflect your PT business.

Step Three: Including A Link To Your Landing Page On Social Media Profiles Will Increase Your PT Leads

Potential clients can come to your landing page from various different points, including:

• Social Media 
• Google Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Google My Business

All it takes is for you to share a link to the landing page in one or all of the aforementioned ways. Once potential clients interact with this link, they will then be redirected to your landing page. 

Many of these examples will be discussed throughout at a later stage within the article. But for this specific section we’re going to discuss how you can get leads by linking to your landing page in your Instagram bio. 

Through this strategy you will be able to target your existing customers, as well as anyone who visits your page by chance.

Take Lily Anderson for example. Visitors who go to her Instagram page will see a link to her site in her bio:

Once visitors click the link, they will be directed to her landing page, which requires them to fill out a short questionnaire about their personal goals. 

Lily then captures her leads by asking visitors to provide a phone number for further communication on WhatsApp.

By advertising a landing page in a similar way on your own social media accounts you can significantly increase the likelihood of generating leads. This is because visitors to your profile will already have an interest in fitness, therefore they will be more likely to sign up for a consultation when presented with the opportunity.

But this isn’t the only way to generate leads through the use of social media.

#2 - How to Generate Leads for Personal Training With Paid Social Media Ads

We’d also recommend using paid advertisements as a form of personal trainer lead generation. 

As we made reference to within the previous section, these advertisements can feature links to your landing pages. These pages will again encourage prospective customers to part with their personal information in order to sign up for a consultation and generate a lead. 

There are various ways of implementing this specific lead generating strategy, so to provide you with options, this section will cover how you can specifically use this feature on both Facebook and Instagram. 

Personal Training Lead Generation Through Meta’s Ad Manager 

Facebook and Instagram ads are controlled by Meta’s ad manager, a software which allows you to create ads to appear on the feed of your target demographic. To control this, you’ll provide the social media site with information such as:

• Your desired customers - e.g. PT Clients 
• The location you wish to target 
• The age and gender of your demographic

By targeting your ideal demographic, you can increase the likelihood of getting leads. This is due to the fact that these are the clients who are most likely to sign up for a consultation with you. 

When using Meta ads, you can actually set lead generation as your primary objective during the creation stage. This will appear under the heading ‘campaign objective’ and will influence the design of your ad. 

In doing so, META’s algorithm will ensure that your ads featuring links to your landing pages are displayed prominently to users who are more likely to interact with it. As a result, said landing pages will likely generate a higher amount of leads, due to who they’re being marketed towards.

A direct example of how these ads are marketed on Facebook can be seen below:

Here you should make note of the link to the landing page being marked with the CTA ‘Click Here’. Potential clients who are captivated by the advertisement will then know what to interact with to express their interest further.

One thing to keep in mind is that these advertisements are inorganic, meaning that you will have to pay for them to appear on the feeds of this targeted demographic. 

For reference, Meta ads operate on a pay-per-click basis/per impression basis, meaning that you will pay a set fee every time a user clicks your ad. The average cost is around £0.78 per click.

By charging on a pay-per-click basis, you will only have to pay if your ad is successful at generating a significant amount of leads. For example, the average cost per thousand of impressions is estimated to be around £5.23. 

Meta ads are therefore regarded as a cost effective way to generate personal trainer leads, but if you’re still looking for a way to cap how much you spend, you can set a predetermined budget.

By setting a budget you’re essentially telling Meta that this is the amount you’re willing to spend on advertising. The site’s automatic algorithm will then determine an effective way of producing leads, whilst remaining in the confines of this budget.

If you wish to have some control over the algorithm, you can choose a manual option and decide how you want Meta to advertise using the feature advertised below: 

If you decide not to do this, Meta will simply automatically post the advertisement to a position the algorithm has deemed most appropriate for leads. 

As a result, an ad you intended for Instagram stories could end up being posted on Facebook news feeds. With all of this in mind, let’s look at how different these ads look, the example below is for an Instagram story:

With Meta’s ad manager you will be able to monitor the performance of each ad across both Facebook and Instagram through the tacking centre. This section of the application will look something like this:

Here, you can find relevant information and statistics that reflect how your ad is currently performing. The data here can influence future ads, highlighting what aspects perform well and other areas that require further improvement on your part. 

If you’re still wondering ‘how do you get leads for your personal training business with these ads?’, check out this graph showing the results of OriGym’s Facebook ad campaign.

This highlights just how effective social media advertising can be, with our own Facebook campaign reaching a total of 352,090 people, with 92 new leads being generated across a total of 9 days. 

To learn more about how you could produce similar results, check out our in-depth exploration of creating effective fitness facebook ads.

How Meta Ads Get Leads for Personal Training Businesses

You will now have a better understanding of how you can set up ads across Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram. As stated multiple times each of the links included within this section should lead to landing pages that encourage clients to sign up for a consultation. 

On Facebook, these links may be incorporated in this manner, which directly tells clients to ‘click here’ :

Whereas Instagram ads will typically feature an internal link that encourages users to ‘swipe up’. This can be seen in our ad which encourage potential clients to ‘get offer’

These internal links can lead to a variety of different landing pages. For example, you can choose to include an external link that will direct your clients to a signup sheet on your own personal website. 

Or you could use META’s own landing pages which look something like this: 

These operate in a very similar manner, but instead of being directed to a third-party site (such as your own) prospective clients can register their interest for your business then and there. 

From the example given above, you can see that this still requires interested parties to submit their personal information in order to make an enquiry. As the creator of the ad you will then be able to access this information in the tracking centre. 

This is an example of a personal trainer lead generation strategy that is completely streamlined, meaning everything is done through Meta’s services, without the client having to leave their site.

In order to determine which method works better for your business, you could implement both separately and monitor the metrics associated with each campaign.

This will allow you to see which campaigns are most effective, allowing you to implement and build upon this approach in the future. 

#3 - Invest In Google Ads To Generate Personal Training Leads

Google ads are one of the most effective ways of getting leads for your personal training business. By implementing these advertisements, your landing page can rank in the top 3 results on Google’s first page. 

This is considered to be a huge benefit, as research conducted by Search Engine Land determined that businesses that fall on this page generate 80% of enquiries for that specific search term.

Think of it this way, if your landing page ranks within one of these positions prospective clients are more likely to see it. As a result, the chances of them giving you their personal information to generate a lead significantly increases too.

For those unfamiliar with this process, here is a basic rundown of how you can go about achieving this:

• You pay Google Ads to rank on top of their first page - This will be on a cost per click basis, meaning everytime someone clicks this ad, you’ll pay Google. 
• Google only allows for a limited number of ads per search term, 4 advertisements at the top of the page and 3 at the bottom. The position yours appears will be dependent on how much money you bid.
• For example, if you search the term ‘Personal Trainer Liverpool’ you can see that Ultimate Performance has paid for an ad space.

Once users click on this link they are immediately directed to a landing page where they are encouraged to enquire:

If you’re interested in generating a significant number of leads, you should put bids on local search terms. What we mean by this is terms that describe your business, followed by its location, such as:

• Personal Training Bristol
• Bristol PT
• Fitness Trainer Bristol
• Personal Trainer Bristol

These are typically cheaper to bid for as you will only be competing against businesses in the local area, rather than at a national or global level. 

In fact, take note of the example we used above, as there are currently no businesses ranking in the ad space for the term ‘personal training bristol’.

But exactly how do you get leads for personal training businesses through Google ads? The answer to this lies in the amount of people being directed to your website/landing page.

By bidding a higher price, your landing page will appear on top of Google’s rankings, a factor that will increase the amount of people visiting your pages. 

This increased traffic will be considered to be ‘targeted’ as those searching the terms will already have an idea about what service they want to invest in. Said clients will therefore be more likely to provide you with their personal information. 

For example, our research indicated that 250 people search ‘personal training Bristol’ every month, and by appearing as the sole ad for this search term you could capture the majority of these leads.

To support our statements, we can see from Google Ads alone OriGym’s various landing pages were able to generate over 20,000 leads in a matter of a year.

Google ads can allow you to capture more leads by directing the targeted traffic towards your site. These prospective clients won’t be searching for training on a whim, they’ll have a specific intent.

By ensuring your business’ landing page is one of the first options they see, you can increase the likelihood of these clients submitting an enquiry and generating a lead. 

#4 - How to Get Personal Trainer Leads Through Google My Business

Remaining on the topic of Google, you can also use the My Business feature to generate leads for your personal training business too. The best part, this application is completely FREE to use.

For those unfamiliar, this feature allows you to create a profile for your PT business - a profile is Google’s term for your business’ listing. Once this has been completed, your business will begin to appear on the maps of local search results.

This initial search will pull up three results that have been deemed most relevant to the search, this is referred to as ‘The Local Top 3’. These highly ranked business will appear on the maps system as so:

Through the creation of a profile, potential clients will be able to gain information relating to:

• Your business’ location
• Relevant contact information
• Review from previous customers
• Other forms of media associated with the brand - e.g. a website/social media profiles 

When a potential client clicks on one of these listings they will be redirected to the company's Google My Business profile. This action will also pull up an expanded list, ranking all the providers in the area, rather than just the local 3-pack.

But how exactly can you get pt leads through a Google My Business profile? Well, during the profile’s creation process, you must ensure to link a landing page, which will redirect clients to a point where they create a lead by providing you with their personal information.

Take the aforementioned example of ‘Personal trainer Wirral’ for example, when visitors to the Google My Business profile click ‘website’ they are immediately redirected to this landing page:

If you implement a similar technique, the first thing clients see when they interact with your business’ profile will be a sign-up form encouraging them to provide their personal information.

To attach your own landing page to your Google My Business profile, follow these steps:

• Once your profile is created, access Google My Business Profile Manager 
• Press the ‘Edit Info’ option on the left-hand column 
• Choose the relevant subheading (add website) and link your chosen landing page

At this point you may be questioning how to increase the likelihood of potential clients clicking your site over competitors.  In this instance, we must stress the importance of ranking within the local 3 pack.

In order to achieve this goal you must ensure that your Google My Business optimises the following factors:

• Relevancy 
• Location 
• Prominence 

Relevancy - This refers to how well your profile matches what the targeted user is searching for. You must therefore ensure that your brand’s information is as detailed as possible, as this will help to match your profile to relevant searches.

Location - This simply refers to how far each potential search result is from the location used in the search itself. It’s therefore vitally important to specify an exact location on your profile.

Prominence - Business’ that are more well known than others online will rank more favourably within Google’s system. Factors that influence your prominence include how many positive reviews you have, and how often your business is mentioned by others online.

To learn more about how you can create a profile and optimise these features, we’d advise checking out our detailed article on How to Use Google My Business as a Personal Trainer.

–-----

If you’re enjoying our personal trainer lead generation strategies, then check out these other OriGym articles:

• Personal Trainer Marketing Strategies & Tips  
• How to Get Personal Training Clients as a PT
• Personal Trainer Video Marketing 

#5 - Implement A Bring-A-Friend Scheme To Build Up Organic PT Leads

When it comes to the world of fitness, personal trainer lead generation strategies don’t have to be solely based online, as you can also implement in-person techniques too.

Referrals, for example, are one of the oldest lead generation strategies available to you, where your existing clients recommend your services to their family and friends.

In this instance, your client may pass along their friends' information directly to you upon their request, after they expressed an interest in your service.

Research from the American marketing company Nilsen shows that referrals are more likely to generate leads than any other form of advertising: 

Here we can see that 87% of Nilsen’s interviewees were likely to make an enquiry and generate a lead following a referral. This is compared to 65% who said they’d make one after seeing an ad on social media.

Whilst some of your loyal customers may be willing to offer a referral free of charge, most will need to be provided with a form of incentive.

For this section, we’re specifically going to look at how you can get personal trainer referrals through free bring-a-friend sessions. 

This approach is commonly referred to as a multi-sided referral incentive, as both clients and trainers can benefit from this referral:

• The existing client gets a free session
• The potential client gets to see what your service is like
• You earn a valuable lead that would have otherwise gone untapped

This is exemplified by Health First Gym who offers PT clients to bring a friend for free or use it to half their cost:

In this instance, you should require the guest to fill out a contact form - a feature which will help you to capture their personal information. Following the end of this session you will then be able to contact said referral in regards to setting up a one-to-one consultation.

In short, bring-a-friend sessions are regarded as an effective way of generating personal trainer leads as your existing clients will do most of the work for you. 

It’s from their referral that a lead will be created, so be sure to always maintain a good rapport with your clients, as this will increase the likelihood of them referring others to your business. 

To increase the likelihood of receiving a referral from your existing clients, you may choose to offer a reward or incentive. For example,PT Davinia Gill provides clients who make a successful referral with a £25 Amazon Voucher:

This strategy can help a personal trainer with the lead generation process as it provides the clients with an immediate source of gratification. Once you have captured the new lead, you can immediately transfer the client their ‘reward’ for making the referral. 

Offering clients an incentive of some sort can greatly increase the likelihood of generating leads, as will become evident by our next point.

#6 - Offer An Introductory Incentive to Further Personal Trainer Leads

When it comes to personal training lead generation, discounted sessions are arguably one of the most effective incentives you can offer. With this system in place, new clients can directly experience your training, without committing to a full pricing package.

For clarity, these inductorary offers will see clients paying a reduced rate for their first session. An example of this approach can be found below, where Fitness First offers new clients up to 50% off their first session: 

Alternatively, you may choose to offer a discounted block of session. For example, this 1Rebel price breakdown shows that new customers will pay £39 for 3 sessions, whilst existing customers pay £66 for the same amount:

Like other examples on our list, once clients click on these induction offers, they will be redirected to a sign-up page where a lead can be generated. This is evident from the above example 1Rebel:

When the clients are new to your business, you can do this in the form of setting up a company profile. That way you will capture and retain their relevant information, which will later help finalise a sale. 

#7 - Take On Fitness Classes To Build Up In-Person Personal Trainer Leads

As a qualified personal trainer you will also be certified to teach group fitness classes. These sessions will provide you with opportunities to directly interact with prospective clients, who you can then recommend your personal training service to. 

As with many of the previous examples given in this list, if you’re looking for a way to electronically generate leads you can use sign-up sheets on your webpages. 

By advertising this manner you can capture leads before attendees turning up to class. As a result, you can teach your sessions whilst being on the lookout for prospective PT clients, who you can then upsell to at a later date.

An interesting thing to note about this particular method is that you can generate leads in person throughout the class, allow us to explain:

Once you begin teaching a specific class, you should introduce yourself for any new students in attendance. Let them know that you’re a qualified personal trainer who also offers 1-to-1 sessions too.

This simple introduction could plant a seed in the attendees minds, and should they enjoy the class you teach they may decide to sign up for full-time training. 

You could also ask the gym or fitness club to advertise your sessions as being ‘run by a certified personal trainer’. This can be seen in advertisement below for a cricket-inspired fitness class:

If the students are already aware of your qualifications, they get a better sense of the expertise you bring to the table, and might even use that as a basis to sign up for your training services.

In some instances, the personal training lead-generation process may be easier if the fitness class you teach is related to the training you provide.

For example, if you’ve completed a strength and conditioning qualification, you should seek to take on classes that focus on this specific skill, such as this example from Virgin Active:

In doing so, generating a lead will become that much easier, as class attendees will already have an interest in the area of fitness you specialise in. 

When it comes time to recommend your PT service, they will be more likely to want the additional training.

In this instance, you can leave a sign-up sheet in the studio at the end of every session and encourage those who are interested in receiving additional training to inquire.

This sheet should work in the same way as the virtual examples presented throughout this article, asking attendees to fill out:

• The names
• Relevant contact information
• What they want to achieve with personal training 

You could also use this technique to seek out individuals who may be struggling to achieve their own goals during class time. 

To avoid singling one particular attendee out in front of the entire class, remind everyone that more personalised sessions are available to anyone who requires it. You can then direct students to use the sign-up sheet at their discretion.

Before You Go!

You’ll now have 7 different personal trainer lead generation strategies to implement in your own business.

We’d advise experimenting with multiple different examples across a variety of online platforms and in-person interactions, allowing you to gain leads from different demographics of clients.

Likewise, completing a Level 4 personal trainer course will see you develop a deeper understanding of the industry, and transferable skills that will make you a much more attractive candidate for your PT leads.

To learn more about our other courses, you can also download OriGym’s FREE prospectus here.